There are a lot of things President Donald Trump wants to accomplish with his tariffs, but part of it seems to be to restore manufacturing jobs to America.
Immediately after World War II, we were the manufacturing juggernaut of the entire world. We had a developed economy, and we weren't bombed back into the 19th Century in the largest war anyone had ever seen on this planet. We could produce goods, and no one else really could.
Trump is trying to bring that back.
Now, though, a lot of people are asking, "Do Americans want to work in factories?"
I'm pretty sure that most of them don't. Children don't grow up dreaming about working on an assembly line making widgets that they don't care anything about. Most people have dreams to do literally anything else.
It just doesn't matter, and we need to stop pretending that it does.
Look, dreams are fine. Dreams are good, even. They make us aspire to different things. Elon Musk's dreams are poised to take us to Mars years after NASA gave up even trying.
Dreams are great.
But dreams are also out of reach in far too many cases.
Back in my day, kids dreamed of being professional athletes, rock stars, or actors all the time. Literally none of my senior class achieved anything of the sort. We all landed in far more mundane occupations. Some of those were, in fact, the realization of other dreams, but many of those were people just settling for something that would pay well since Plan "A" didn't pan out.
Today, the dreams are different — a lot of kids want to be "influencers" on top of the other stuff, which I get because that looks really easy — but the odds of achieving it are still slim to none for most people.
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By all means, work toward those dreams, but at some point, you've got to pay the bills.
That means getting a job, but not everyone can go to college. Not all of those who do complete it. That means we end up with a lot of people without college degrees who need jobs that will help them live out the rest of the American dream.
Manufacturing jobs can provide just that. I've worked manual labor in my life. I've worked in office settings and from home as a writer. I've been in factories and warehouses to earn a paycheck. What I'm doing now is a dream come true for me — the acting thing never worked out for me, unfortunately — but I had to pay the bills for years before it ever could.
I didn't want to do any of that. None of it was work I wanted.
It was, however, work that provided a living, supported my wife and children, and put food on the table.
What people want to do isn't the metric anyone should be using when looking at the possibility of manufacturing coming back to the United States. No, the metric we should consider is whether it would improve the lives of tens of thousands of Americans who are currently making less than they could if they were on an assembly line somewhere.
Dreams are great, but reality doesn't care about your hopes and aspirations. At some point, people have to pull up their Big Girl/Big Boy pants — and there are no third options here, for the They/Them crowd, so get bent — and take care of business. Want to still work on your dream on the side? Fan-freaking-tastic. Go for it and I hope you find success.
Until then, earn your pay and pay your bills, and if a manufacturing job will make it easier to do both, do you really care if that's what you wanted to do when you were a kid?
I didn't think so.
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